WND EXCLUSIVE

Internet in bull's-eye for new 'hate speech' plan

Proposal would evaluate language, make 'recommendations'

Jerome R. Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D., is a WND senior staff writer. He has authored many books, including No. 1 N.Y. Times best-sellers "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command." Corsi's latest book is "Partners in Crime."

The same SPLC has blasted the Drudge Report for covering “black crime,” charging that the immensely popular Internet news aggregator “has been rife with what the online publisher calls ‘scary black people’ stories.”

The site said Shapiro quoted FBI “hate crime statistics” to show there are about the “same number of attacks on Jews in this country as there are homosexuals.”

Joseph Farah, WND founder and CEO, long has been targeted by SPLC, which has described WND as “the conspiracist ‘news’ site.”

“Hate crimes” and “hate speech” have surged into the headlines this week as WND reported that if two Democratic lawmakers have their way, Barack Obama’s Justice Department soon will submit a report for action against any Internet sites, broadcast, cable television or radio shows determined to be advocating or encouraging “violent acts.”

That’s from the text of a new bill from Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.

The Hate Crime Reporting Act of 2014 “would create an updated comprehensive report examining the role of the Internet and other telecommunications in encouraging hate crimes based on gender, race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation and create recommendations to address such crimes,” stated a news release from Markey’s office.

The president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Alex Nogales, thanked Markey for the work “to confront and combat hate speech in the media that targets our most vulnerable communities.”

He said NHMC “has long-recognized that an update to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s 1993 report, ‘The Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes,’ is long overdue and desperately needed given the incredible evolution of our communications systems over the past 21 years as well as the ever-increasing numbers of hate crimes targeting Latinos and others.”

“As the author of the original piece of legislation directing the 1993 report, there is nobody better than Senator Markey to join Congressman Hakeem Jeffries and others in calling on the NTIA to study this pressing issue once again,” Nogales said.

NHMC, along with its fellow Soros-funded group SPLC, have worked on the idea of a federal rule against “hate speech” in the political content of all forms of telecommunications, including the Internet.

Markey’s effort dates back to 1992, when as a congressman from Massachusetts he used the Telecommunications Authorization Act to direct the NTIA to produce a report on the role of telecommunications media in hate crimes, the first and only report ever so completed by any federal agency at the direction of Congress.

That report, issued in December 1993 under the supervision of then-Secretary of Commerce Ron H. Brown, “The Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes,” focused on broadcast television and radio, as well as cable public access channels, telephone hotlines and the computer bulletin boards that preceded today’s Internet.

The 1993 NTIA report’s most frequently cited source was a February 1992 SPLC report, “Klanwatch Intelligence Report.” It was cited in the first footnote and 18 subsequent footnotes referencing the Ku Klux Klan as the prototypical right-wing extremist hate group in America.

SPLC not only provides “resources” to lawmakers across the nation, it also boasts of providing training to law enforcement officers “at the local, state and federal level.”

“Thousands of officers have received training that helps them recognized and deal with hate crimes.”

It also operates a “Hate Map,” which apparently was used by a confessed terrorist to identify Christians to kill in 2012.

In that case, Floyd Lee Corkins II identified SPLC as his source of information when he decided to murder staff members at a Christian organization in Washington, the Family Research Council.

Corkins, a homosexual activist, told investigators he had gotten details about FRC from SPLC, which publicly had labeled FRC a “hate group” because of its biblical position on homosexuality.

After Corkins’ confession, he was sentenced by Chief U.S. District Judge Richard W. Roberts to 25 years in prison because, on Aug. 15, 2012, he walked into FRC headquarters and started to shoot with the intention of killing “as many people as I could.”

He managed to shoot and injure just one person, facilities manager Leo Johnson, who is credited with heroically stopping the attack

Corkins admitted he picked FRC because the organization was listed as an “anti-gay” hate group by the SPLC on its website.

FRC promotes traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs about the family and homosexuality, but SPLC claims the organization’s “real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians.”

Corkins, a former volunteer at an LGBT community center, pleaded guilty to terrorism.

It was NHMC that in 2009 revitalized a concerted effort to carry on Markey’s idea to establish federal government regulation of telecommunications content by seeking to institutionalize an annual NTIA report. The hope was to establish a link between the use of telecommunications media and hate crimes.

On Jan. 13, NHMC wrote a letter to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., that suggested behind-the-scenes coordination may have been occurring or that NHMC had prior knowledge of a plan to implement the telecommunications hate crimes measure. The letter thanks Jeffries for introducing to the House a telecommunications hate crimes bill Jeffries actually introduced two days later.

The NHMC letter claimed the 1993 NTIA report was now outdated because “one could not have anticipated the explosion of the Internet or the multitude of ways we all stay connected today.” It argued that an updated NTIA report “will augment the record with current data and information in a way that will raise awareness about the depth and impact of hate speech across all media platforms.”

The letter was signed by some 45 leftist organizations, including SPLC.

WND reported the new one-page bill calls for the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to “analyze information on the use of telecommunications, including the Internet, broadcast television and radio, cable television, public access television, commercial mobile services, and other electronic media, to advocate and encourage violent acts and the commission of crimes of hate.”

The bill does not define which actions by broadcasters would be considered to have encouraged violence, seemingly leaving that open to interpretation.

Once the report is compiled, the bill calls for “any recommendations” for action “consistent with the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States” that is determined to be an “appropriate and necessary” way to address the purported encouragement of violent acts.

The original law, called the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, was signed by Obama when Democrats strategically attached it to a “must-pass” $680 billion defense-appropriations bill in 2009.

The law cracks down on any acts that could be linked to criticism of homosexuality or even the “perception” of homosexuality. Obama boasted of his accomplishment.

“After more than a decade, we’ve passed inclusive hate-crimes legislation to help protect our citizens from violence based on what they look like, who they love, how they pray or who they are,” he said.

But the criticism was vocal and pointed. American Family Association President Tim Wildmon warned the new law “creates a kind of caste system in law enforcement, where the perverse thing is that people who engage in non-normative sexual behavior will have more legal protection than heterosexuals. This kind of inequality before the law is simply un-American.”

He pointed out that the legislation also creates possible situations in which pastors could be arrested if their sermons on sexuality can be linked in even the remotest way to acts of violence. For example, if someone hears the biblical description of homosexuality as a sin and uses that message as a reason for acting.

The Alliance Defending Freedom also blasted the “hate-crimes” bill, calling it “another nail in the coffin of the First Amendment.”

“All violent crimes are hate crimes, and all crime victims deserve equal justice,” ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley said in a statement. “This law is a grave threat to the First Amendment because it provides special penalties based on what people think, feel or believe.”

“It is fundamentally unjust for the government to treat some crime victims more favorably than others, just because they are homosexual or transsexual,” Dacus said. “This bill is an unnecessary federal intrusion into state law-enforcement authority, and it is an unwise step toward silencing religious and moral viewpoints.